Topic navigation

Blog Articles

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 now generally available

I think Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the most developer-friendly Red Hat Enterprise Linux that we’ve delivered, and I hope you agree. Let’s get down to business, or rather coding, so you can see for yourself. You can read the Red Hat corporate press release.

For this article, I’ll quickly recap Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 features (architecture, containers), introduce the very new and cool Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI), and provide a handy list of developer resources to get you started on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Content in BaseOS is intended to provide the core set of the underlying operating system functionality that provides the foundation for all installations. This content is available in the traditional RPM format. For a list of BaseOS packages, see RHEL 8 Package Manifest.

Application Streams, essentially the next generation of Software Collections, are intended to provide additional functionality beyond what is available in BaseOS. This content set includes additional user space applications, runtime languages, databases, web servers, etc. that support a variety of workloads and use cases. The net for you is to simply use the component and version that you want. Once there’s market demand, newer stable versions of components will be added.

Everything you need to grow your career.

Linux containers

Linux containers are a critical component of cloud-native development and microservices, so Red Hat’s lightweight, open standards-based container toolkit is now fully supported and included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Built with enterprise IT security needs in mind, Buildah (building containers), Podman (running containers), and Skopeo (sharing/finding containers) help developers find, run, build and share containerized applications more quickly and efficiently—thanks to the distributed and, importantly, daemonless nature of the tools.

Introducing Universal Base Image

Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) provides a freely redistributable, enterprise-grade base container image on which developers can build and deliver their applications. This means you can containerize your app in UBI, and deploy it anywhere. Of course, it will be more secure and Red Hat supported when deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but now you have options. There are separate UBI 7 and UBI 8 versions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 8, respectively. Read more about them in the Red Hat Universal Base Image introduction.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 developer resources

Over the past few months, we have produced a number of how-to documents specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Here’s a list in case you missed them:

Red Hat Developer Subscriptions

Red Hat Developer members have been enjoying no-cost developer subscriptions for 3+ years now, and RHEL 8 is now automatically part of that. If your company wants developer support, there are several Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Subscriptions options with Red Hat support, too.